The First Europeans in Ohio

At a glance

Knowing about Ohio before seeing it

Long before any European set foot in present Ohio, French missionaries already knew it existed by reputation. The Jesuit Relation of 1647-48 describes "a great Lake nearly two hundred leagues in circumference, called Erie," whose southern shores had once been home to "the Nation of the Cat," people who had "retire[d] far inland" from enemies -- written knowledge passed on by Native informants, not a French visit (Jesuit Relations, vol. 33). By 1660 and 1662, French missionary reports spoke, "on the assurance of the Indians," of a "beautiful River, large, wide, deep" somewhere to the west (cited in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Louis Jolliet).

The La Salle question, and who really saw the river

Ohio's own historical marker for the episode calls Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle "thought to be the first European to see the Ohio River," describing a 1669-70 voyage down the Allegheny and Ohio (marker 20-43). The claim is far shakier than the marker's hedge suggests. It rests on two documents written years after the fact -- an anonymous memoir of about 1678 and an account based on conversations from the same year -- and not on anything La Salle wrote himself. A 1951 study in the Indiana Magazine of History found that La Salle "never claimed the discovery of the Ohio" in any surviving paper, that his own letters and even his 1675 patent of nobility mention no such feat, and that the geographic details attributed to the trip (a waterfall at the wrong latitude, the wrong number of deserting men) do not match what is actually known (Krauskopf, Indiana Magazine of History 47, 1951). The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is blunter still: La Salle returned to Quebec in the summer of 1670 "having discovered neither the Ohio nor the Mississippi" (DCB, La Salle).

What is documented is that in September 1669, at Tinawatawa near present Hamilton, Ontario, La Salle's Sulpician traveling companions Dollier de Casson and Galinee met a French traveler -- probably Adrien Jolliet, though a footnote in one printed source names his more famous brother Louis -- who had abandoned his canoe on the shore of Lake Erie and walked fifty leagues after his Iroquois guide grew fearful of enemies. Galinee called the route "a new route, heretofore unknown to the French" (Galinee, in Kellogg, Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1917). No source, however, places that traveler on Ohio's own shore of the lake.

The best-documented sighting of the Ohio River by name belongs to Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette. In June 1673, descending the Mississippi, they passed the mouth of a river "called Ouaboukigou ... [that] flows from the lands of the East, where dwell the people called Chaouanons" -- the Shawnee, and the Ohio (Marquette, in Kellogg, 1917). Marquette's own map marks it "Wabonkigon." They saw only its mouth, hundreds of miles downstream from present Ohio, but theirs is the first eyewitness account of the river that can be trusted.

Traders reach the valley, decades before settlers

The first documented European party to reach the Ohio Valley itself came earlier still, if imprecisely recorded. Historian Charles Hanna dates it to 1692, "when white men -- twelve New York Traders, led by Arnold Viele -- seem first to have reached the Ohio Valley"; Viele's men reappeared at Albany in February 1694 to fetch powder for their company, then still in Shawnee country (Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, vol. 1, 1911). Whether any of them actually stood on Ohio's own side of the river is not recorded.

By the 1730s, English and French traders were both present. A French letter of July 27, 1734 mentions an English trader's warehouse "in the home of the Shawnees on the Ohio River," at the town straddling the river at the Scioto's mouth (Wikipedia, Lower Shawneetown). But the first European known by name to have actually lived in Ohio, in the records available, is a French trader called Saguin. In June 1743 the French commandant at Detroit reported Iroquois peoples "seated ... of late years" on the Cuyahoga River, and sent an officer to inspect "the trading post where the Frenchman called Saguin carries on trade." The inspector found that Saguin had not sown corn that spring, "as was his wont," and that local chiefs said they could not feed "yourself and the Frenchmen who live with you" -- meaning Saguin's post already had a trading house and cornfield by autumn 1742 (Navarre's 1743 report, in Hanna, vol. 1, pp. 314-318). Hanna traces the name of the Chagrin River to a corruption of "Saguin," though he calls this his own inference.

The lead plates of 1749

In 1749 France moved from trading posts to a formal claim of the whole valley. Pierre-Joseph Celoron de Blainville left Lachine on June 15 with a force his own journal counts at "one Captain, eight subaltern officers, six Cadets, one Chaplain, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and about thirty Indians" -- roughly 250 men by the count later used on Ohio's own historical marker for the expedition, a fair round figure among several similar tallies from different sources (Celoron's journal, Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 29, 1920; marker 12-31). At each major tributary the expedition buried an engraved lead plate and nailed the king's arms to a tree, claiming "the said river Ohio, and ... all those which fall into it, and ... all the territories on both sides as far as the source of the said rivers" for France.

Six plates went into the ground, at the mouths of the Conewango, the Allegheny near an "Indian God" rock, a creek the journal calls Kanououara (probably Wheeling Creek), the Muskingum, the Kanawha and the Great Miami. Only one has ever been recovered fully intact: the plate buried at the mouth of the Great Kanawha on August 18, 1749 was found "by a boy while playing on the margin of the Kenawha river" in March 1846 and now belongs to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, which calls it "the only plaque that survives intact" (VMHC, Celoron Plate). The plate buried at the mouth of the Muskingum on August 15, 1749 -- directly opposite present Marietta -- was found in 1798 by boys bathing in the river, who cut part of it into bullets before the remaining fragment passed to Caleb Atwater, then Governor DeWitt Clinton, and finally the American Antiquarian Society (Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 29, 1920). The plate buried at the mouth of the Great Miami, near present Cincinnati, has never been found at all. Historian O. H. Marshall reasoned that one plate was never buried: Senecas obtained it "by some artifice" from the French, and a Cayuga sachem carried it to British official William Johnson on December 4, 1750; after Johnson explained its contents, the sachem called it "Devilish writing" (same source).

Traders, captives and the first missions

Christopher Gist, sent west by the Ohio Company of Virginia, spent the winter of 1750-51 traveling among Ohio's towns and left the fullest eyewitness record of the period. On Christmas Day 1750, at the Wyandot town of Muskingum (near present Coshocton), Gist read the Church of England homilies to a mixed audience of traders and Wyandot, who gave him the name Annosanah and asked him to baptize their children -- an episode a later editor of his journal called the first Protestant religious service in Ohio (Gist's journal, ed. Darlington, 1893). The following month, at "White Woman's Creek" (the Walhonding), Gist met Mary Harris, taken captive from New England as a child, "not above ten Years old," now "upwards of fifty," living with "an Indian Husband and several Children" -- a reminder that Europeans and people of European descent had been living inside Ohio's Native towns, as captives and their families, well before any organized settlement (same source).

James Smith, captured in 1755 at age eighteen while helping cut a road for Braddock's army, was taken to an Ohio Delaware town where his hair was plucked out but for a scalp lock, he was scrubbed in the river by three young women, and a chief told him "every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins" (James Smith, An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences, 1799). He eventually slipped away from his captors near Montreal in 1759, boarded a French prisoner ship, and made his way home after months in French custody -- a fair summary of an escape that in truth took several more steps before he reached Pennsylvania in early 1760 (same source).

Organized Christian missions came later still. Schoenbrunn, the earliest mission town this research located, was founded May 3, 1772 by Moravian missionaries among the Lenape; its church was finished that autumn "41 days after the first log was cut," and its schoolhouse, teaching Lenape children from books prepared in Delaware and German, began that December (marker 16-79). Gnadenhutten followed on October 9, 1772. There, on July 4, 1773, missionaries John and Maria Agnes Roth had a son, John Lewis (Ludwig) Roth, baptized by David Zeisberger the next day -- the first child of two European parents recorded as born in Ohio, according to the mission's own diary (de Schweinitz, Life and Times of David Zeisberger, 1870). An 1852 county history calls missionary John Heckewelder's own daughter, born at Salem in April 1781, "generally said to have been the first" white child in Ohio -- a claim that was already eight years too late when it was published, since Roth had been born in 1773 (Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, 1852, cited in de Schweinitz). Heckewelder himself had married Sarah Ohneberg at Salem on July 4, 1780, in what the mission's historian called "doubtless, the first wedding of a white couple" recorded in the present state of Ohio (de Schweinitz, 1870).

War, forts and squatters

Ohio's only fort of the Revolutionary War, Fort Laurens, was built near Bolivar in November-December 1778 by General Lachlan McIntosh's army and named for Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress. A British-led force besieged it from February 22 to about March 20, 1779; the starving garrison boiled their moccasins, and a relief column arrived three days after the siege lifted. The last soldiers left on August 2, 1779 (Ohio History Central, Fort Laurens). The remains of a soldier excavated at the fort site in 1973 were reburied with military honors in 1976 as the Unknown Patriot of the American Revolution.

After the war, unauthorized American settlers moved onto Ohio land faster than Congress could stop them. In spring 1785, an army officer marching from Fort McIntosh found and dispossessed families at squatter towns with names like "Mingo Bottom or Old Town," Norris's Town and "Haglin's or Mercer's Town," reporting "upwards of three hundred families" at the falls of the Hocking alone and settlers "moving ... by forties and fifties" (Ensign Armstrong's report, St. Clair Papers, vol. 2, 1882). A notice signed by one of the squatters, dated March 12, 1785, even called elections for a convention "for the framing a constitution," asserting that "all mankind ... have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country" -- three years before Marietta's founders would claim the honor of Ohio's first organized government (same source).

Marietta and the first legal towns

The first legal, organized American settlement came on April 7, 1788, when 48 members of the Ohio Company of Associates landed their boat -- built as the "Adventure Galley" and remembered as the "Mayflower" -- at the mouth of the Muskingum River, having overshot the spot in the rain and been towed back by soldiers from nearby Fort Harmar (Hildreth, Pioneer History, 1848). They named their town Marietta, an abbreviation of Marie Antoinette (same source). Squatter towns on the Ohio's banks had claimed earlier settlement dates, and Martins Ferry in Belmont County still calls itself "Ohio's First Settlement," but Marietta's claim is specifically to the first legal, federally sanctioned town.

Other towns followed quickly: Columbia and Losantiville (renamed Cincinnati) near the Little Miami and the future site of downtown Cincinnati, both in late 1788; Gallipolis in October 1790, when "more than four hundred" French emigrants arrived to find that the land they had paid for had never actually been secured by the company that sold it to them, forcing many to buy their lots a second time from the Ohio Company (Hildreth, 1848); and Cleveland, founded July 22, 1796 by Moses Cleaveland's survey party of fifty-two people -- though a Connecticut Land Company agent reported only three men living in Cleveland in 1800 (Ohio History Central, Cleveland).

Sources

• Jesuit Relations, vol. 33 (1647-48)
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Louis Jolliet
• Ohio historical marker 20-43, La Salle Expedition
• Krauskopf, "The Documentary Basis for LaSalle's Supposed Discovery of the Ohio River," Indiana Magazine of History 47 (1951)
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography, La Salle
• Galinee's journal, in Kellogg, Early Narratives of the Northwest (1917)
• Charles Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, vol. 1 (1911)
• Wikipedia, Lower Shawneetown
• Celoron's journal, Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 29 (1920)
• Ohio historical marker 12-31, French Claims to Ohio River Valley
• Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Celoron Plate
• Christopher Gist's Journals, ed. Darlington (1893)
• James Smith, An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences (1799)
• Ohio historical marker 16-79, Schoenbrunn Schoolhouse and Church
• de Schweinitz, Life and Times of David Zeisberger (1870)
• Ohio History Central, Fort Laurens
• St. Clair Papers, vol. 2, ed. William Henry Smith (1882)
• Hildreth, Pioneer History (1848)
• Ohio History Central, Cleveland, Ohio